By Gary Gerofsky

Iran is quickly becoming the cause celebre and darling of the Left. On a Canadian campus I recently listened to Zafar Bangash, director of the Islamic Society of York Region, make an outrageous defense of Iran and scathing attack on Western civilization — Imperialism, according to Bangash, is the greatest problem in the world, Iran, however, has been assigned favourite victim status by Bangash. He was being sponsored by leftist groups, Islamic students, a Jewish anti-Israel group called Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), and the “Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War.” That last group concentrates on only one country for very special critical treatment — Israel.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Although many Muslim leaders openly articulate their efforts as part of a larger picture — one that culminates in the resurrection of a caliphate adversarial by nature to all things non-Muslim — many Western leaders see only the moment, either out of context or, worse, in a false context built atop wishful thinking.

Among other things, this myopia causes virtually all Western politicians to overlook long-term threats and focus exclusively on violence and terror, the tangible and temporal — those things that may coincide with their tenure.

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By Barry Rubin

Of course, conflicts between Sunni and Shia Muslims are not at all new, but the fact that this is becoming a central feature on the regional strategic level is a dramatic shift. After all, as long as there were secular-style regimes preaching an all-inclusive Arab nationalist identity, differences between religious communities were subordinated. Once there are Islamist regimes, theology becomes central again, as it was centuries ago.

However, no one should misunderstand the situation. This is fundamentally a struggle for political power and wealth. When Sunni and Shia states or movements battle they are acting as political entities not pursuing old theological disputes.

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By Gary Gerofsky

The obsession of the EU, the USA, the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Russia and even the Vatican to interfere in Israel’s domestic and foreign policy reminds me of the treatment of a Big Brother who has failed to do right in his past and thinks that he can make amends by forcing little brother to make all the sacrifices that Big Brother never has and never will make to satisfy a guilty conscience.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

The totalitarian nature of Sharia law can only be grasped when one appreciates how thoroughly it permeates and dictates everything in a believer’s life — including when and to whom a Muslim may smile.

Popular Islamic TV preacher Sheikh Muhammad Hassan appears in this video clip asserting that, according to Sharia, it is “not at all permissible” for Muslims to smile at non-Muslims, “except in cases of da’wa.”

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

As we approach the end of the first year of what has been called the “Arab Spring,” it is worth examining the nature of Shi’a (Shiite)-Sunni relations in the Middle East. Indeed, commentators such as Patrick Cockburn have been warning that “since the start of the Arab uprisings this year, Shi’a-Sunni hostility has deepened again wherever the two communities seek to live side by side.”

To discuss this issue, a country-by-country survey is useful wherever there are significant Shi’a-Sunni divides in the population.

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by Alan Jacobs*

Few professors in the controversial world of Middle East studies boast more about their own notoriety than Juan Cole, a man who believes the consistent criticism of his public positions to be a sign of distinction. Yale University’s decision not to hire him for an endowed chair five years ago due to insufficient scholarship led him to publicly charge that George W. Bush and the CIA torpedoed his candidacy. When organizations such as Campus Watch publicize Cole’s outlandish commentary, he cries “censorship” and labels them “McCarthyite.”

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By Gary Gerofsky

The only non-military response to Islamism and the creeping sharia (Islamic law) that is infecting the world is through strength and activism against this scourge and against those in power who are facilitating Islamist expansion. The generations that went before us defeated communism and fascism, and now we must step up to the plate to defeat Islamism. This task is made seriously difficult because we have a Muslim supporter in the White House and weak, ignorant, misinformed leaders married to multiculturalism, wishful thinking, and leftism that is intent on appeasing Islamists in all but a few places (For political reasons related to 9/11, Al Qaeda seems to be the only real Islamist concern for the Obama administration.) Our Western countries have become divided states, one part for the radicals and one for the majority of citizenry — and, by virtue of our free and fair society, they are both afforded the same rights. The new world order has its new world leader with Obama encouraging dissent and self-loathing among his own countrymen while boosting the political fortunes of Muslim Brotherhood forces who want us dead and who live by their belief in intolerance and a world ruled by Islamic edicts.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

In the run-up to the Tunisian Constituent Assembly elections and the aftermath that saw a plurality of seats won by the al-Nahda (Renaissance) party, you may have noticed frequent references in the media to this political organization as a “moderate Islamist” party. This is of course not the first time such terms have been used to denote Islamist political factions: recall for example how the ruling AKP party in Turkey is often called “mildly Islamist” (to borrow the Economist’s phrasing).

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

As the U.S. troop presence in Iraq continues to diminish, it is worth examining what sort of political system has been left behind. Is Iraq really a democracy as many officials in the Bush administration hoped it would be? Sadly, the answer to this question cannot be in the affirmative.

It is of course true that in March 2010, Iraq conducted elections recognized as free and fair by the UN. However, as Osama al-Nujayfi, the Sunni speaker for the Iraqi parliament, astutely observed, democracy is more than just about holding elections. In many of the other essential aspects of a truly democratic society, Iraq’s status is far from satisfactory.

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by Robert R. Reilly
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011. 244 pp.

Reviewed by Raymond Ibrahim*

Last week, “Saudi Arabia’s religious police arrested an Indonesian housemaid for casting a magic spell on a local family and ‘turning its life upside down.’” The maid “confessed” to using sorcery, and “commission experts took the magic items to their office and managed to dismantle and stop the spell.”

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By Gary Gerofsky

Peace Studies at McMaster University — non-violence, Gandhi peace events, love and peace — who could possibly take exception with such positive messages of global tolerance and efforts to make the world a peaceful place to live? Who would dare challenge this facade of eternal goodness and inclusion? Well, allow me to interject to explain why, in our Orwellian world, peace does not mean what it should and how a department has been hijacked by a monomaniacal agenda that concentrates on criticism of one democratic country and treats tyrants and terrorists as if they were angels. This is an agenda copied from what they do in the UN where peace has also been turned on its head to mean the enabling of: war, terrorism, historical revisionism, moral relativism, and support for groups that are anti-Western. This Peace Studies department must be viewed and scrutinized in the context of Israeli activist and sometimes-government-minister Natan Sharansky’s “3D test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double-Standards and Delegitimization.” Confronting free and law-abiding countries and ignoring real tyrants as if they do not exist is now acceptable behaviour to certain academics and administrators who hide behind the false banner of “peace” to convey their love of concepts of non-peace, war, hate and envy. The custodians of higher education at universities, if they have anything to say at all, which is rare, hide behind free speech and academic freedom to slough off criticism of the campaigns being waged under their willfully blind leadership.

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by Steven Plaut*

Israel is under assault from within and not just from the usual suspects. Its legitimacy and, in many cases, its very existence are being attacked by a domestic academic fifth column. Hundreds of professors and lecturers, employed by Israel’s state-financed universities, are building careers as full-time activists working against the very country in which they live. And the problem is growing. Fortunately, the Israeli public has become aware of the problem and is increasingly demanding that something be done about it. A not inconsiderable part of the credit for this belongs to the Middle East Quarterly, probably the first serious journal to discuss the problem a decade ago, sparking a debate that continues to challenge the Israeli academy’s offensive against the Jewish state.

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by Amitai Etzioni*

The 2001 attacks on the United States have intensified the debate that has existed since the dawn of Islam: How is the West to respond to the followers of Muhammad? Some — most famously Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington — held that the contest is between two rather monolithic civilizations that are bound to clash. In a 2007 award acceptance speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Lewis described a history of clashes between Islam and the West. He stated that at first Muslims sought to spread their nascent faith through conquest throughout the then-Christian world; then the Christians invaded the Muslim world (the Crusaders); then the Muslims pushed back into Europe (the Golden Age of Islam); then the West retaliated by colonizing the Muslim world; and now the Muslims are again rising against Christendom by terrorism and flooding Europe with immigrants.[1] Huntington argued that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”[2] By contrast, President George W. Bush stated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that “Islam is peace,”[3] while British prime minister Tony Blair argued that the problem was not Islam but “extremists trying to hijack it for political purposes.”[4]

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

When reading Western reports dealing with Islam, one must learn to read between the lines. Many of these reports do state the actual facts; but without providing proper context, Western readers are often left to interpret the information according to their own understandings.

One example: the ubiquitous term “sectarian strife” to describe Muslim-Christian clashes in the Middle East is factually correct; yet “sectarian strife” connotes comparable forces fighting one another, when in reality it is often nothing less than a vastly outnumbered Christian minority being grossly oppressed by Muslim majorities, as has happened for centuries.

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